496 SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST. God with humanity in Christ by an analogy long before used, that union with God which was vouchsafed to holy enlightened men and prophets. What was a transient and fragmentary thing in their case, they being sometimes filled, at others forsaken, by the Spirit of God, this was an entire and constant union in the case of Christ alone, like the union betwixt soul and body. As all motions of the body proceed from the soul, so the soul of Christ could impart no other motions to his body than those inspired in it by the word."2 Accordingly, it was an important point with him to give prominence to the purely human element in Christ, so as to keep clear of all Docetic illusions. He supposes that as freewill, and therefore the capability of sinning or not sinning, belong to the essence of human nature, so we may venture to ascribe to the man in Christ also, abstractly considered (in abstracto), only the posse non peccare. By a non posse peccare we should destroy the essence of virtue, which is grounded in freewill.3 In so far, then, as we contemplate this man as subsisting, independently for himself, we must also suppose in him the possibility of sinning. But it is quite another thing, when we conceive of the man as one united with God; and when we speak of Christ as of one in whom deity and humanity are united, we can but predicate of him absolutely the impossibility of sinning. In opposition to some exaggerated statements of eminent ancient fathers, he affirms that what is related concerning the conflicts of Christ in view of death, the feeling of sadness, his human weakness, is to be understood in the proper sense. Even the authority of Augustin could not shake his conviction on this point. "Let Augustin say what he will," he remarks, we affirm that as Christ took on him true humanity, so too he had the real defects of human weakness."4 Hugo a St. Victore and Peter Lombard, on the other hand, seek to reconcile the opposite declarations of the church fathers by distinguishing from one another the different kinds of weakness, the purely human, the natural, and those connected with sin. Hugo a St. Victore says: "There is a moderated fear, which dwells in every man and is without sin, like hunger and thirst;" he means that connected with the natural instinct of self-preservation, the shrinking of the natural feelings from death. "This we may suppose to have been in Christ." Peter Lombard distinguishes from a passion, by which the mind may be affected in an extraordinary manner and drawn away from the right course, another which cannot draw it away from the contempla 66 illa unione, sicut caeteros homines in sus natura consistere posse? Alioquin minoris valetudinis esse videretur, si per se ipse subsistere non posset, non [here, beyond doubt, there is some mistake in the reading, it should read nam] et magis acciden tis, quam substantiae naturam habere. Ep. ad Roman. lib. i, p. 538 et 539. Dicat Augustinus voluntatem suam, nos vero dicimus, quia, sicut veram humanitatem assumsit, ita humanae infirmitatis veros defectus habuerit. Sentent. c. xxv. DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT. AUGUSTIN. 497 tion of God, and from that which is right. The former he calls propassio; the latter passio, a distinction which might have proved of some importance in morals. The arriving at a distinct conception of the way in which the salvation of mankind was wrought out by Christ, was a matter on which little attention had thus far been bestowed, in comparison with the investigations on other subjects belonging to the system of faith. Though the whole of that which from this period onward was, for the first time, more sharply defined in the explication of conceptions, admits of being already pointed out, in its germ and principle, in the foundation of Christian consciousness, as it is presented to us in the declarations of the earlier church-teachers, yet everything was as yet quite indistinct and fluxive, as it is wont to be where the language of feeling predominates. Things connected in the feelings were not as yet separated and held apart in conceptions. And as the second period furnished in this respect nothing that was peculiarly new, we have scarcely touched upon this subject in tracing the development of doctrines in it. The twelfth century constitutes an epoch in the history of this doctrine; and on this account we shall state in connection with what is here to be mentioned some things that belong to an earlier century. As the scholastic theology attached itself, generally, to Augustin, and we find in him the germinal ideas out of which it proceeded, so it may be shown that this holds good also with respect to the doctrine in question. On the subject of reconciliation, Augustin is on his guard against an anthropopathical misconception that might easily arise, if one were not careful to separate the idea lying at bottom, the objective reality from the symbolical form of expression. "We must not so conceive," says he, the reconciliation of man, as if God required blood in order to forgive men; but we should understand it in the sense that God loved men before the creation of the world, and his love was the very cause of his sending his Son into the world: "Not as though God now first began to love those whom he before hated, as an enemy becomes reconciled with his enemy, but we are reconciled with him who already loved us, with him whose enemies we were by transgression."2 Thus, Augustin perceives in this idea of reconciliation a subjective element, and yet at the same time its foundation in something possessing objective reality. He was also the first to consider the question respecting the necessity of a redemption in precisely this form. He started the query, whether any other way would have been possible; and, considered from the point of view of the divine omnipotence, he believed the answer must be in the affirmative. But no other way, he supposed, would have been so well adapted for man's recovery from his wretched condition; and this conclusion he derived, not from the intrinsic nature of the case, not from the laws of the moral government of the world, but from the subjective influences thereby to be 'De trinitate, lib. xiii, c. xi, § 15. * Quod ergo reconciliati sumus Deo per mortem filii ejus non sic audiatur, ut jam inciperet amare quos oderat, sicut recon ciliatur inimicus inimico, ut deinde sint amici, sed jam nos diligenti reconciliati sumus, cum quo propter peccata inimicitiam habebamus. In Joann. Tract. ex, § 6. 498 ATONEMENT. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. produced, from the relation of this method to the affections, to the religious need implanted in man's heart; for nothing was so directly calculated to awaken its hopes, as the way in which God here manifested his love, which could be done by no act so effectually, as by his entering into union with human nature." Anselm of Canterbury was the first who sought to demonstrate the necessity of the work of redemption wrought precisely in this way by the incarnation of God and the sufferings of the God-man, on rational grounds. It is evident from his remarks, that at that period not only theologians, but also simple laymen (a proof of the more general habit of reflection on religious subjects) employed their thoughts a good deal on the question, why God might not have forgiven men by a simple act of his will, why he might not have wrought out the redemption of mankind by some angel or man.3 With the more profound apprehension of the nature of sin, is connected in Anselm's mind a more profound apprehension of the idea of punishment and of the divine justice; a fact which becomes particularly manifest when we compare him with those who, as the older Alexandrians, resolve the idea of punitive justice into that of disciplinary love, and apprehend punishment simply as a means, and not according to its true conception and essence. "The honor due to God" from this point he starts "consists in this, that the creaturely will should submit itself to the divine will. Only such a creaturely will performs works acceptable to God, if it can act; and if it cannot do so, it is acceptable to God in itself." Now, since in every sin, God is deprived of this honor, which is his due, all sin is therefore sin against God; it is impossible that the matter of it should here make any difference. Now punishment and sin appear to him to be necessarily correlative ideas. Punishment is required in order to exhibit sin in the moral government of the world in its objective significance, to mark a standing distinction in the sight of God between that which is sin and not sin.5 The punishment of sin is necessary in order that its due place may be assigned to it in the moral government of God. He endeavors to show that all conception of punishment, even in civil relations, goes back to the conception of punishment grounded in the essence of divine justice." "Rather should the universe fall in ruins, than that the least thing should be done against the will of God. A substitute for the punishment required by the law can only be a satisfaction furnished therefor, when something is afforded for indemnification which outweighs the offence; as, for example, when one man has wounded another, it is not a sufficient reparation to see that the wound is healed, but there 1 De trinitate, lib. xiii, c. x, § 13. 2 See the two books composed in the 'form of dialogues: Cur Deus homo and De conceptu virginali et originali peccato. In the book, Cur Deus homo, lib. i, c. i: De quaestione non solum literati, sed etiam illiterati multi quaerunt ac rationem ejus desiderant. In every sin Deo non reddere debitum. Si peccatum dimittitur impunitum, similiter erit apud Deum peccanti et non peccanti. • Nihil aliud, quam recte ordinare peccatum. 7 Deum vero non decet aliquid inordinatum in suo regno dimittere. Pro contumelia illata plus reddere, quam abstulit. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 499 must also be added a satisfaction for the pain endured. Man being impure, was unfit to enter into the community of the holy and blessed. As blessedness is that full satisfaction which excludes every want, so it is due to none but him who possesses pure righteousness."1 Anselm now seeks to show, that no man was in a condition to afford that satisfaction for sin, required by the moral government of the world. The way in which he does this, evidences the purity and severity of his standard of morals, and proves how far he was from holding to an ascetical work-holiness. For the purpose of laying open the insufficiency of all good works, he represents the other party as saying, "Do I not honor God, when in the fear and love of God, and contrition of heart, I renounce all earthly enjoyments, in abstinence and labor deny myself the comforts of this life, and am ready to communicate to all men, to forgive, to obey God in all things?" And he answers: "Even if a man refrained wholly from sin, he would in all this be only doing his duty. But at present he is not capable even of that; and his inability is still no excuse, since this very inability is his fault. Now, as sin proceeded from one man, so must satisfaction for all proceed also from one. Such a being must have something exalted above the whole creation which he can freely offer to God, if the satisfaction is to be complete. He must have been God, therefore; but the satisfaction should be furnished by a man, because otherwise it could not be given for men; he must therefore have been a God-man, whose life as such, as infinitely exalted above the whole creation, possessed an infinite value. He voluntarily surrendered himself to a death to which he was not subject on account of sin." Noticeable, withal, is the way in which Anselm distinguishes and separates the ethical significance of the death of Christ from the doctrinal, and contemplates the death of Christ, in the first-mentioned point of view, as a result brought about by his whole activity in his vocation. "We should be careful to distinguish," says he, "what Christ did because obedience to God required it, and what he endured as a lot brought upon him by the obedience which he showed, while at the same time it was not necessary in order to the showing of that obedience. His perfect obedience to God he manifested in continuing steadfastly true to righteousness; and the natural consequence was that the Jews plotted against him the death to which he freely offered himself. Thus it clearly appears how the satisfying power of Christ's death by no means involves in it that he sought death, or that God required the death of an innocent person." Christ's victory over Satan in the severest temptations, Anselm contrasts with the sin of our first parents, who so easily gave way to the impulses of appetite. God owed him a recompense for this; but being all-sufficient in himself, no such recompense could be given him, Christ could only transfer it to Quemadmodum beatitudo sufficientia est, in qua est nulla indigentia, ita nulli convenit, nisi in quo pura est justitia. Ipse sponte sustinuit mortem, non per obedientiam deserendi vitam, sed propter obedientiam servandi justitiam, in qua tam fortiter perseveravit, ut inde mortem incur. reret. 500 THE ATONEMENT. ANSELM AND ABELARD. others. His life and his death contain infinitely more than is requisite to give satisfaction for all the sins in the world. It is clear from this exposition, that Anselm's doctrine of satisfaction certainly included in it the idea of a satisfactio activa, the idea of perfect obedience which was required in order to satisfaction for sin, and which Christ alone was able to afford. To the significance of Christ's offering in the sight of God, necessarily belonged also the moral worth of the same. Far from Anselm, however, was the idea of a passive obedience, the idea of a satisfaction by suffering, of an expiation by assuming the punishment for mankind; for the satisfaction which Christ afforded by what he did was certainly, according to Anselm's doctrine, to be the restoration of God's honor, violated by sin, and by just this satisfaction afforded to God for mankind was the remission of punishment to be made possible. How far from him was that idea of a satisfactio passiva, appears evident also from the circumstance, that he does not seek at all to give prominence to the unhappiness of Christ in his passion, but rather to show that, amidst all his sufferings, he still was not unhappy. "In like manner," says he, " as happiness is not promoted by any agreeable thing which happens to one contrary to his wishes, so it is not to be called unhappiness when one, after wise deliberation, not forced by any necessity, but with freewill, undertakes something disagreeable." Another reason which he considers a valid one, why the God-man alone should be the redeemer of mankind, is, that man could not otherwise have attained to the possession of his dignity, but would have been made dependent on a creature. Another characteristic in Anselm is, that he seems fully aware how the fact will not pass into any conception. "Many other considerations," says he, "conspire to show that this was very befitting, which may be more easily and clearly seen in the life of Christ and his works, than by mere arguments of reason."2 "Who can fully explain how necessary and conformable to divine wisdom it was, that our Saviour should live as a teacher among men, at the same time proving his doctrines by his conduct and presenting himself as an example to mankind. But how could he have exhibited himself as a pattern to weak mortals, that under suffering and death they should not swerve from righteousness, if he had not endured all this himself?" It may be gathered from Anselm's representations, that this particular doctrine occupied in a special manner the thoughts of theologians and laymen in this age; and that the older view, containing truth in a mythical form, as, for example, that, in purchasing the redemption of man, Satan should have his due, could not be satisfactory to the acute dialectics of these theologians; and it served to call forth the skepticism which was now aimed against the whole doctrine of satisfaction. We here come to see the difference between Anselm, whose investigations proceeded from a childlike faith, and a profound sense of Chris 1 Vita ista tantum amabilis, quantum est bona. * Sunt et alia multa, cur valde convenit, quae facilius et clarius in ejus vita et operibus, quam sola ratione monstrari possunt. |